Friday, December 31, 2010

I had a chance to visit Belgium in early December. It seems so close to Brno on the map, but is so far away in reality. The winter here in Europe has been really severe this year, and the flight schedule was all messed up, but we managed to get there 8hrs after leaving our flat.

One thing that I was looking forward to was, of course, to eat fresh fish, especially shellfish. We found a great restaurant near the hotel we stayed in the area called "the upper town." The restaurant is called "La Tortue Du Sablon." It is a cozy restaurant on one of those pedestrian-only type of alleys, but the decor was very nicely done and had a very romantic feel to it. The restaurant seemed to specialize in lobsters. We were the first diners there, but the place filled up around 8pm or so, and a lot of people were ordering lobsters. Since it was the first time there for us, we decided to go with a set menu with an additional order of fresh oysters on the shell.

You can't believe how happy I was to taste the raw oysters. Within a month or so after coming back to Brno from Japan, I was again feeling deficiency of fish. We would try expensive sushi, but it doesn't nearly taste as good as the "real" sushi in Japan. We were getting tired of routine meat dishes. So my brain was going "fish, fish, fish...." almost everyday till I had the first bite of raw oyster, which melted just nicely in my month.

The entire dinner was just so perfect. I would definitely go back there if I have another chance to visit Brussels.

Thursday, December 30, 2010

Our landlord is just so nice. Ever since we moved into the flat, they have been accomodating our needs, such as fixing the shower floor (it wasn't draining well, as the shower was not included in the original plan when they renovated the flat) and putting shelves in the toilet.

Our landlord Tom and Barbora came over one weekend in late November and installed a new set of dual curtain rails, which was another thing that we asked them. It took them about 3 hrs to install both rails, as they had to cut the rails to match the width of the windows, too. Professional work indeed! They look just beautiful. Now all we have to do is to go buy a set of curtains that shall hang there.

Boy... it has been over a month since I had my last post. December is typically busy for everyone, and so was it for me. I had three International trips - one to Belgium in early Dec, one to the US in mid Dec, and the last one to Dubei in late Dec. Other than Dubai, my consulting work followed me all over the place (yep, ended up working in the hotel rooms, etc).

Anyway, the December is almost over, and I am really looking forward to the upcoming year, which seems to have lots of interesting changes already.